The Pain of Passing: On Mayukh Sen’s Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star

Mayukh Sen’s scrupulous and moving biography, Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star, considers the Golden Age actress’ ambivalence toward her white and Sinhalese ancestry through a decolonial lens. In 1936, Merle Oberon, then 24, became the first performer of color and Asian descent to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. But Oberon never got to revel in her achievement’s historic importance. To succeed within a far more racist and xenophobic environment, Oberon took pains to pass for white. “This was less a choice than a necessity,” Sen writes, “and it came at great psychic cost to her.”

The Gray Man Theory: On Graydon Carter’s When the Going Was Good

A terrible thing has recently happened to me. I have become obsessed with the golden era of American magazines. This grave affliction manifests itself in several symptoms. First, it causes one’s reading list to grow to enormous length. Just when you think you’ve discovered the last memoir about answering phones at the midcentury New Yorker, or cowering under the thumb of Anna Wintour at Vogue, or of late nights at Partisan Review in the hard-drinking glory days, or at the in the high-flying Sixties, several more rear their heads, like martini-soaked Whack-a-Moles. And because the whole thing involves the settling of long-simmering scores and the clashing of titanic egos, you’re almost obligated to read everything in order to form a full picture of the personalities involved.

The Town Where Journeys End: On The Inland Sea

The train exits Matsuyama through the curving walls of pine and bamboo which give way to the city’s rural outskirts. Here, rice fields are shaved low for the winter, mowed down to a tan stubble of hardened stalks that bend and break over each other in the last phase of their growth, or the first phase of what comes after growth. They are truly the dead of winter. All that is left for them is their immolation at the hands of their farmer, most likely a grandmother in a floral handkerchief and sunglasses. Beside and above these wrecked fields rise the maroon branches and black-green leaves of mikan trees, only just harvested, the round gaps where their fruit hung still traced by supple foliage.

Ross Douthat’s Sandbox Universe: On Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious

All apologetics are bold. You need guts to ask someone to reconsider their entire worldview. Viewed in that light, Ross Douthat’s Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious might seem like a more modest entry to the genre. Douthat, one of the few right-leaning columnists at the New York Times, stops short of asking everyone to join him in his Catholicism, or even in Christianity. Instead, he aims at a wider target, arguing in favor of believing in God and joining a religion. Believe is not a treatise on why religion is good for you as a person, or good for society.

The Moral Authority of a Body: On Kate Manne’s Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia

Kate Manne’s Unshrinking is very successful in achieving the ends it sets for itself. It is an exemplary trade book, and we may expect it to win some prizes, and to be an absolute hit in the book clubs. Part of what is involved in being an exemplary trade book in 2025 is the display of a tight focus on a clearly defined cluster of points, easily transferable into the bullet-point format (prize juries do not typically read their books cover to cover). This book’s core philosophical notion, and one of the principal bullet points that was likely part of its initial “elevator pitch,” is what Manne calls “the moral authority of the body”: if your appetite makes itself known to your conscious mind, its imperative comes with real moral force.

Toward a Sordid Utopia?: On Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small

The writer Lore Segal — known in particular for Other People’s Houses, her novelized account of fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria as a ten-year-old — once asked Vivian Gornick to explain feminism. “What is it that you want? I don’t think I’ve ever understood,” Segal said. Startled to be asked such a question in the early 2000s, Gornick began to explain. Segal listened to Gornick’s perspective and then summarized, “with something like wonderment, ‘You have a passion for equality.’” Gornick was astonished that Segal didn’t. “I have a passion for many other things,” Segal said, “for love, and friendship, for good conversation, for living inside another’s imagination — but not for equality. There are many things I cannot live without before I cannot live without equality.”

Desperado Dadaism: On a New Biography of Terry Allen

Lubbock, Texas is almost exactly five hours from Dallas, Albuquerque, Oklahoma City, and El Paso. It’s home to Texas Tech University, the National Cowboy Symposium, and frequent dust storms and tornadoes. In 1951, the still-unexplained “Lubbock Lights” sightings helped to kick off the UFO craze. In 1988, 12,000 pilgrims came to Lubbock to witness an alleged apparition of Mary. In between these two phenomena, a young man named Terry Allen left Lubbock for California. He wanted to become an artist, but he wound up becoming something more. Allen is perhaps the only person in history to achieve equal acclaim in the fields of conceptual art and country music.